From standard.co.uk
By Jessica Salter
From fancy rings to smart apps, and even high-tech temperature-adjusting mattress toppers, the global sleep tech market is worth more than $21bn. But is our obsession actually destroying our health? Jessica Salter reports
I am, I admit, a sleep swot. Or at least, I try really hard to get the top (sleep) marks. I wear an Oura ring (so does Prince Harry), a sleek device that gives me a “sleep score” based on how well I slept the night before (made up of how quickly I fell asleep, how much deep or REM sleep and number of total hours), and that plays into a “readiness score” I get for the day ahead. I track my sleep in other ways, too: my Apple Watch also watches out for sleep apnoea, while my Eight Sleep mattress topper – a high tech device that automatically adjusts its temperature to increase the amount of REM sleep – gives me a report in the morning too.
I am mildly obsessed with them all, in different ways. As are many of us: the global sleep tech market is estimated to grow by 18% to $95.2bn by 2032, according to Global Market Insights. But I’m also alive to the possibility that too much monitoring can cause its own problems. Because, you see, I’ve been here before. In 2015, I was an early adopter of the Jawbone – now defunct – which was one of the first wearables you could track sleep on. It was – looking back now – pretty rudimentary, and far from accurate. But my terrible sleep patterns (I’ve been a lifelong insomniac) laid out in black and white sent me into a tailspin before bed. Eventually, I had to quit it.
“One of the major causes of poor sleep, is anxiety,” agrees Bethany Hughes, co-founder of The Remedy Clinic, based in Harley Street (remedy-clinic.com). “Most people suffer from some form of anxiety these days; add in your sleep tracker or device telling you that you’re not hitting your sleep goals, and you’re adding to the problem further.” American researchers have dubbed those who have an unhealthy obsession with their sleep “orthosomniacs” and found that ironically, orthosomniacs actually worsened their chance of a good night’s sleep.
Worrying about our sleep seems to be a national sport. Whilst sleep experts consistently say we need between 7-9 hours of shut eye a night, 60% of us don’t get six hours a night, according to The Clean Sleep Report 2024. The consequences can be devastating on our health. Along with the short-term effect on our mood and motivation, studies show that a lack of sleep can lead weight gain and obesity, heart health problems, and an increased risk of dementia amongst others.
The advice is often quite simple: go to bed and get up at a consistent time each day (including weekends), wind down properly before bed (meaning no blue lights from screens) and make your bedroom conducive to a good night’s sleep, meaning a dark and cool room (temperature around 18C, paired with blackout blinds or an eye mask). But what if you’ve heard all that a million times, and still sleep eludes you? It’s the reason so many of us are seduced by the nearly $60bn sleep market (which dwarves the sleep tech segment), and even by suggestions from TikTok (that ever reliable purveyor of health news), where there are more than 3.5m videos devoted to #sleep.
“One of the challenges is that few of us are equipped with evidence-based knowledge and information about sleep,” says Dr Rebecca Robbins, a sleep scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital. “Rarely, outside of formal medical education, do we receive sleep instruction; even medical doctors receive about two hours on average of sleep education in medical training.”
It was in a quest to end my insomnia – and really understand the reason I couldn’t sleep – that I turned back to sleep tech at the start of the year. I had been advised to wear the ring by Dr Mohammed Enayat, founder of the longevity clinic HUM2N in South Kensington, who was also testing 120 bio markers in my body to find any biological reasons for my lack of sleep. My tests revealed a punishingly low level of magnesium, for which he prescribed me medical-grade supplements. But he also advised using the Oura – with which he has no affiliation – to help with lifestyle habit forming, too.
I quickly found that as it monitored my heart rate variability and temperature, it could give me prompts about what things I did that naturally mucked up my sleep – things that no amount of magnesium was going to fix. A couple of glasses of wine in the evening quickly showed up as terrible for my sleep score (I could squeak by on the odd one). A late-night workout? Surprisingly fine. Not getting enough steps in a day: often fitful sleep. It was real-time little world nudges that I needed to learn how to fulfil one of the most basic bodily functions.
Rhian Stephenson, nutritionist, naturopath and founder of ARTAH (artah.co) says she thinks “any tech that gives you a better understanding of your how certain lifestyle habits affect your sleep or overall health is great. We’re never taught to observe how we feel in relation to what we eat, drink or do, so becoming more mindful of how our choices affect our health is great.” She says that while she’s long been telling patients that alcohol affects their sleep, it’s not until they see it on their own “sleep report” via their Oura ring app, that they see its real effect.
But she agrees with Hughes that there are risks. “It’s easy to become obsessed with metrics and to cause anxiety when they’re out of the good” range.” She worries for the people who get a bad score, “and then feel anxious which can have a negative impact on the choices they make for the rest of the day.” I have occasionally had the opposite: that after being woken up several times by a small child, my reports told me I had actually got enough of the deep and REM sleep that I needed – and that I’d be ok for the coming day.
While I found that reassuring, it’s something Hughes would prefer me to gauge for myself. She thinks we’d benefit from dialling down the tech, and instead listening more to our bodies. “We can be in danger of getting caught in the data, and the tools that should open our eyes, actually dampen our own ability to hear ourselves.” Really, the bags beneath my eyes tell me all I need to know.
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